Science and the search for the truth

Here are my notes taken from my first hcj lecture of the year

In journalism you can believe that something is true but you can never know the absolute truth of anything. This has recently been proved by the famous bold headline 'The Real Truth' linked to the Hillsborough disaster was lies. As a journalist you may never know the truth but you can be honest.

Kant and the concept of time
The universe is ultimately unknowable. Before Kant and in Western Philosophy people believed they could understand the Universe. However it became then apparent that the universe is unknowable. In modern theories the concept of time is limitless. (Unlike the Buddhist thoughts that time is limited.)

Kant's concept of time is the most complicated he suggested that there is seventeen types of time.

Kant suggests that the concept of space cannot be empirical. The concept of time is created in consciousness and the fades away.
"Space is not an empirical concept which has been derived from outer experiences."

Truth can be divided into two types.

A priori 'truth before experience,' for example we know that all triangles have three sides and that 'all bachelors are unmarried' although we have no resided in using first hand collect experiments to meet these conclusions we know they must be true. Kant said space is aprori

The second type of truth is Aposteriori, these are known as facts. We reach these truths by experimenting first. We observe the world by experimenting.


We briefly touched on Kant’s ideas on ‘noumena’: things which we cannot see but we know are there. These are known as 'the thing in itself,' things in themselves are unknowable.

Aristotle
In the dark ages Aristotle was the most important philosopher. The Organon, Aristotle's standard collection of six works on logic, had become dogmatic around the time it was created. Aristotle divided logic into two types.
Inductive logic (moving from a particular proposition)
and deductive logic (moving from a  general proposition, usually mathematics and geometry)
Deduction :  All swans are white. This is a swan therefore it is white. This example is a flawed deductive argument as not all swans are white.

Bacon attempted to destroy Aristotle's dominance; he viewed Aristotle as fundamentally wrong-headed, and criticised Aristotle's theories from their logical foundations upwards. Bacon replaced Aristotle's syllogism with induction in his epistemology. The new Organon is critical. Bacon was by no means the first anti-Aristotelian philosopher, Galileo was amongst those who opposed him.

From Newton to Einstein

The Copernican Theory in 1543 was the eruption of Science. It was the idea (that we now know as fact) that the Earth and the planets revolved around The Sun.
This created a clash of Science and the Dogma and the traditions

The Verification principle
The truth of any proposition is the way in which you verify it. Therefore, if a proposition cannot be verified, then it is neither true nor false.
However, arguably the verification principle cannot be verified itself.